Update: Please read all the comments before sending me a question! You can find my FreeNAS posts/Tutorials here:
- FreeNAS – switching back. About my decision to move back to FreeNAS from Windows Home Server.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part One – Installation – installing the FreeNAS server onto a PC.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Two – Configuration – configuring FreeNAS and Windows File Sharing.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Three – Upgrading – Upgrading your FreeNAS Server.
- Using Microsoft SyncToy 2 with FreeNAS – Automating your backups – for free.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Five – XBOX 360 – Using FreeNAS with your XBOX 360 (this post)
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part 6 – Adding another drive
Very quick one here – but since I get a lot of hits looking or this information, I thought I would post it. Enabling the XBOX 360 to see the FreeNAS server is very simple.
- On your FreeNAS admin page, select UPnP under Services.
- Click Enable on the UPnP page.
- Give it a name that you will recognize when browsing via the XBOX.
- Set the network interface (should be set if you only have one network card.
- Select the FreeNAS share you want the XOX 360 to use – in this case I am sharing my Movies folder with my XBOX – I could also add music, pictures, etc.
- I left the port blank to use the defaults.
- Under Profile just select XBOX 360.
- You can enable the Control web page or not.
- Click Save and Restart.
That’s it – on your XBOX 360 you should be able to go to the media blade, select Video, then browse for computers and see the FreeNAS server (you may have to press the blue “X” button on the XBOX remote to change the source of the movies, music, whatever. Below is the UPnP screen shot from my FreeNAS server.
Fantastic news that you got it up and running, and what timing – as I just updated and am having issues again – so I will look into your recommendations Dan… don’t worry about my name, no-one else does
Sorry lain, just noticed I made the same mistake and called you Ian – apologies!
Hi Guys,
I know the last post was a while ago but this thread helped me along so I thought I would add my further findings to get my xbox 360 connected.
I have been trying to get the above working all day now and finally got it sorted. I found Ian’s comment about the IP to be correct and that if you add it to the config file it works. However every time I added it as suggested it failed. I then tried adding it directly to the to the fuppes.cfg file and restarted the service but each time I restarted the file was overwritten.
After a lot of digging I found that you could edit the /etc/rc.d/fuppes file which is the file that creates the fuppes.cfg file when the service is restarted. This file can be edited using freeNAS’s Advanced|File Editor. Look for:
and add your xbox ip address between tags, e.g.:
192.168.1.100
Then save the file and go to the uPNP service page and hit save and restart to re-create the fuppes.cfg file. You should now be able to see your files from your xbox.
Hope that helps someone.
you should be good with a gig stick…..
I know what you mean about the IP appears to go away, I believe it does take the information also – I ran into something similar. Also try restarting the service, enable disable after you complete all these steps.
haha… Iain… sorry.
well i went through your steps, but that last bit about adding the xbox IP on the config page – theres the bit at the top of the page that says:
“Device and file settings are currently not configurable via this webinterface.
Please edit the file: /var/etc/fuppes.cfg ”
when i do enter an IP, it seems to take, but on a refresh it goes away.
i also noticed that when i rebuild the database, i see this error in the system log:
“kernel: pid 3578 (fuppesd), uid 0 inumber 3200 on /: filesystem full”
i’m guessing thats the root of my problem? i’m booting off a thumb drive… i’m not sure how big it is, i’ve got a 1G one right here – i’ll try that one too.
thanks.
It sounds like you may be having issues with the final part of my description
Finally In the web user interface I did the following:
From the configuration page I added the IP address of my xbox 360 (at the bottom, submit query)
lot of different names for me… it is Iain, not Ian or Lain… thanks anyway though ppl.
Hope this helps adam
i’ve been struggling with this as well… i just upgraded to 0.69b4 and followed Ian’s directions, but i still see an empty list when i browse to the freenas server from my 360.
i have a PC on my network running tversity which does work with my 360 (so i’m assuming that my network is cool for uPnP) – but could that be causing a conflict?
I am assuming this doesnt work for .686.4? I do not have a XBOX option on my UPnP tab. Have tried the “Default”, also enabled UPnP on my router, rebooted everything, and prayed to the networking gawds. Nothing has helped, and appreciate any insight.
TIA, TJ
@Lain – All this worked on the latest freenas 0.69b1 (revision 3504). I was getting all the above issues after upgrading from .68b and this seems to have fixed it. I still have an unusual device name on the 360 for the freenas box and will look into this later. I think the “allowed IP address” option is the trick.
Well here is my take on it, I have samba shares that I use in my UPnP setup, so disabling samba will not help the cause. Also using WMP and adding the FreeNAS samba share will not help distibute the content… you need to get the UPnP working.
Here is what I did in FreeNAS:
Enabled UPnP
Use xbox 360 profile
Add the various directories I want to share
Enabled the web user interface
In the web user interface I did the following:
From the options page, rebuild the database
From FreeNAS diagnostics page:
Check UPnP logs, make sure that you see the rebuild completed (takes a while depending on size of shares)
In the web user interface I did the following:
From the options page, rebuild the virtual container
From FreeNAS diagnostics page:
Check UPnP logs, make sure that you see the virtual container rebuild completed (takes a while depending on size of shares)
Finally In the web user interface I did the following:
From the configuration page I added the IP address of my xbox 360 (at the bottom, submit query)
Hope this helps
@Rob. Thanks, looking into it right now. A clue – I also have an SMB share in addition to the UPnP. Gonna disable one and see what happens.
@Christopher – I don’t know what this issue is – my content just seems to show up when I drop it onto FreeNAS – of course, I have to have the XBOX re-read the directories, but never have to reboot FreeNAS. I’ll see if I can find anything that might cause this.
Rob
Thanks for the info – I’ve had this setup up and running great for some time now but one thing that I can’t figure out is this. When I add media to the freenas device – in order to see it on the 360 is to reboot freenas? Any thoughts? Again, thanks for the info!
@Iain – Nice! Glad you got it working. I will upgrade to the latest on Friday. Glad they got XBOX support working again!
It appears I have it working with the latest version, I simply rebuilt my database and virtual container, and all seems to be working – I thought I also added my xbox as an allowed IP in the configuration section – but it doesn’t appear to exist – I may investigate this further.
Thanks for all your help.
@Iain – Sorry – I didn’t have time this weekend. My next window of opportunity will be during the day on Friday. Feel free to ping me THU evening/FRI morning to remind me
rob [at] lagesse [dot] org
I don’t suppose you had any luck? I would like to know if anyone has been able to get it to work on the later versions – cause if it is just my problem I will continue to use the latest version on my new PC (which come today). However if it is a bug, then I will use the older version known to work.
Great, well I will love to hear your results on Sunday. I just purchased myself a new machine to run FreeNAS on, more reliable than my old laptop.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883118005
@Iain – I need to install the latest build. I use 0.686 still – and it works as I outline in this post. If you have tried that version and it doesn’t work then I’m lost
So I’ll try to test the latest and see what happens – won;t happen until Sunday evening though.
I trust my internal network, the issue is if there is a flaw in any of the applications that you use – leading to malicious software opening ports etc.
Regardless, I tried to enable upnp on my router, it didn’t make any difference, I saw no new ports being opened and I could still not see files. The interesting thing is, I see the media server – it is not given the name I specify which is strange – I then connect and it shows no folders. If I stay connected to the media server on the 360 and change the profile of the upnp server I can then see the folders, but I am unable to browse them.
Could anyone provide a step by step guide to setting this up?
Thanks for your prompt responses rob – I appreciate your help.
@Iain – if you do not trust your INTERNAL network then I agree with you. Opening an EXTERNAL port to a specific INTERNAL app isn’t dangerous unless you just aren’t paying attention.
upnp is not a secure solution. malicious software can automatically open ports. it is far better to know the ports upnp is opening and specifically forward them instead.
Yes, enable uPNP. What do you see as the drawbacks? I have run uPNP since hardware/software existed to support it – it just makes my life easier.
so I have been following this thread in the hopes my 360/upnp woes would be solved. I took the risk and went to the latest nightly build – but my 360 still sees no files.
I was wondering, do I need to enable upnp a my router – l would rather forward ports, is this something which is needed? Any assistance in this area would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
@ Jim C – thanks – I’ll give it a try!
The b2 version works perfect now for the UPNP server. The Xbox sees all the videos pictures and music files.
@JimC – Moving files to other file systems WILL cause some difference in sizes – but nothing like what you are seeing. I think something odd is going on. Try using something like SyncToy to move them over (or BeyondCompare http://www.scootersoftware.com/) – something that actually compares the files after they are copied.
Rob
Thanks for your help rob I am trying it now. I do have another interesting question for you. I am using “cp -r” to copy folders from a NTFS drive to a UFS (all on the freenas server). The folder is there with all the file names, but when checking the size, some of the files are greatly different. These are 4Gig mpg files that were copied to only 384meg?
Are there any known issues using the copy command at the shell?
thanks
Jim C
From your web browser on your PC do a backup of your config – then you can always restore that if the “downgrade” blows your system. In my experience, downgrading just works. But do the backup
Rob
Right now I am running it on a memory stick. If I format a new stick with the old version, will that blow all of my Raids and shares out of the water?
Thanx
JC
Earlier up in comments (#9, I think) we discussed the fact that newer versions of FreeNAS don’t support uPNP for the XBOX. Try to back up to version 0.686 and let us know if that works for you (that is what I run).
Rob
It is 0.69b1 (revision 3504)
The computer it is on is an old dual athlon 2400MP dual CPU. Standard 100BaseT ethernet, and 5 hard drives. 2 of the drives in Raid 1. 2 are in as NTFS (read only) and another one is a UFS format as a dump drive.
The Fuppes info is as follows
Version: SVN-r578
Hostname: freenas.local
OS: FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE
SQLite: 3.4.1
build at: Jun 1 2008 – 08:10:39
build with: 3.4.6 [FreeBSD] 20060305
Thanks for replying so quickly
JC
@JimC – What version of FreeNAS are you running?
Rob
Need help getting the XBox to see the files from the Upnp server. It sees it and connects, but there are not files, reguardless if I look for music, pictures or video. All of my shares work and I can even see the device from my XP MCE computers. I have opened up the UPNP server in xp/explorer and recompiled the database (to see if that was the issue) I do have the have both the devices connecting to a gigabit switch, with the router/dhcp off one of the switches ports.
Any help or insight into this would be greatly appreciated.
@Scott. Very happy you like it here, and I am always happy to help. If you use Twitter, that’s the best way to find me about 20 hours a day
Now back to my offer – I don;t expect you to call me to explain what QoS is – but if you try to get QoS to work and it won;t, call me. In other words, try Google first
But seriously, call me if you need to. If I am busy I will tell you, get your number, and call you back.
Glad we met.
Rob
Sounds excellent Rob, you definitely got yourself a new reader here.
Thanks for all the help!
@Scott – I bought the Router new for about $45.00 and downloaded Tomato as soon as I have the router plugged in. Literally took <5 minutes to install the Tomato FW (which sounds scary, since you void your warranty, and you overwrite the Linksys code).
But it was SO easy I didn’t even do a tutorial on it.
Tell you what – buy the router – if you have trouble getting it set up, call me, no charge. Either you’ll find it is so simple you don;t need to call me, or I’ll help you and then write a tutorial on it. This series gets 100-300 hits per day, so another popular post would be nice
I’m just not convinced that setting this Router up requires a tutorial
Rob
Thats great to hear.
One final question, as far as the WRT-54G and Tomato go, how difficult is the setup? I like to consider myself fairly knowledgeable. But as far as networking goes I am quite the novice at this point.
@Scott – I have never been worried about the speed of my wired network. Every machine I have is backed up to FreeNAS while I sleep, and my main download directory is replicated to my FreeNAS server every hour. Documents every 4. Videos/Music and Pictures every day. Using MS SyncToy 2.
I don’t notice any speed hits when I am using my machines (after the initial sync, of course.
Rob
That was perfect, I am planning on setting up a similar setup once I get my FreeNAS box up and running. Is the transfer speed sufficient with the FreeNAS box without using any gigabit?
Thanks Again,
Scott
@Scott – it may be a relatively old post, but it gets a great deal of views – so I imagine I’ll pay attention to it for some time!
My current network is a Time Warner Turbo cable modem hooked to a Linksys WRT-54G Wireless Router running Tomato (Linux, open source) firmware.
This is a four port Router that also handled Firewall, QoS, etc (I highly recommend it – search my blog for Tomato and you’ll find my post on it).
The FreeNAS server is connected directly to this Router. I have a couple of Ethernet Switches hooked to the Router to service the rest of my network. The XBOX 360 is wired directly to the WRT-54G (well one XBOX 360 is – the other one is connected via wireless).
I also have a Cisco 1200 Enterprise Access Point with external antennas wired directly to the Router. This is my main wireless, even though the WRT-54G also does WLAN. I use the Cisco because of it’s better range and reliability. I have the Linksys set to only route to the Internet – so I can let guests on that wireless without worrying about access to my internal network.
I have two TiVo Gen 2 boxes connected over Wireless, 8 computers on the wired network, and 6 that are wireless only.
My main computer is a dual-proc, dual core system that usually runs Vista 32 Ultimate (but also runs Vista 64 Ultimate and Windows Server 2008, depending on my needs that day). It has 8GB of RAM and 4 750GB drives. This is also my Media Center PC – it has two Digital/Analog HD tuners in it. For graphics I use two NVidia Geoforce 8800′s powering for LCD monitors (2 24 inch wide screens and two 17 inch standard format.
Sounds like a lot to manage, but I really only spend a small amount of time working on the network. I don’t upgrade firmware just because I get an update – only if it fixes a problem or adds a feature I really need – and that is rare! The PCs are pretty static, except for my main machine. Most of the other machines are used to RDP into the main machine depending on which room I am in.
Rob
Hi Rob, I know this article is over a month old, but I was wondering how do you have everything hooked up. Between the FreeNAS server, your main computer and your 360. Whats going through what in terms of routers/switches/etc.
Thanks in advance.
That is good to hear. Hopefully the Mediatomb contributors find the time to implement support for Xbox360.
@Teranoize – I suggest you stay with 0.686 (available on the FreeNAS download page). Until they enable the MediaTomb XBOX support, 0.686 is the last version to fully support the XBOX 360. BTW – you CAN downgrade from 0.686.1 to 0.686.0 without issue.
@Teranoize – Yes, mine was an upgrade.
@rob – Did you upgrade from an older version or install from scratch? I would love to get this to work even if I have to go that route.
@Teranoize – why did you do that? I am on the distro of 0.686.1 of FreeNAS and my XBOX still works fine. Of course, I don’t add anything to the FreeNAS release.
Freenas version 0.686.1 replaced the uShare UPnP Media Server with MediaTomb 0.10.0 which killed Xbox support.
@happyshow – after you upgrade you will probably have to go to the videos selection on the Media Blade on the XBOX and select the “X” button on your XBOX remote to “Change Video Source” – then reselect your FreeNAS server.
At least that is all I had to do.
Are there any new instructions for the release of FreeNAS 0.686.1 beta revision 2728? (Feb. 8, 2008)
I installed this upgrade and it seems that the conection to the XBOX 360 is broken now and it will only work with the PS3 and 3 other clients.